Welcome to the August 7, 2023, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
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Wildfires Spur New Detection Systems
BBC News
David Silverberg
August 4, 2023
Wildfires plaguing Canada and elsewhere have prompted the development of new detection systems that could provide earlier warnings of such conflagrations. German aerospace startup OroraTech has eight satellites that monitor temperatures from orbit with infrared sensors. In combination with other satellite data, the system can rapidly detect and report anomalous temperatures to clients like forestry and firefighting services. OroraTech's Thomas Grübler said his company's software also can predict the rate of a fire's spread. Josh Mendelsohn at New York-based startup Cornea said his company's artificial intelligence-driven fire-mapping system incorporates geographical and topographical data "to optimize how we give those forest management personnel a clearer ability to communicate to communities what the wildfires risks are."
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Untangling the Animating of Tightly Curled Hair
Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science
August 4, 2023
Researchers at Yale University and the University of California, Santa Cruz designed a new physical model for animating tightly curled hair, including its movement when stretched or bent. Like much of computer animation, capturing the physics of hair is achieved through a series of sophisticated mathematical equations. Yale's Theodore Kim said the equations for highly coiled hair can be simplified by not simulating the cross-sectional twist along a hair. Said Kim, “Usually, the people computing these things just see a sea of numbers, and it was hard to know what’s really was going on. But with our analysis methods, we can start seeing the geometric structure of what's happening."
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Unpatchable AMD Chip Flaw Unlocks Paid Tesla Feature Upgrades
Tom's Hardware
Brandon Hill
August 3, 2023
Security researchers at Germany's Technical University of Berlin have cracked modern Tesla vehicles' Media Control Unit (MCU) to access paid features through an unpatchable flaw in the MCU-controlling AMD processor. The researchers said they launched a voltage fault injection attack against the third-generation MCU-Z's Platform Security Processor, allowing the decryption of objects stored in the Trusted Platform Module. They explained, "Our gained root permissions enable arbitrary changes to Linux that survive reboots and update. They allow an attacker to decrypt the encrypted NVMe [Non-Volatile Memory Express] storage and access private user data such as the phonebook, calendar entries, etc." The researchers found hackers can access Tesla subsystems and even paywall-locked optional content via the exploit.
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Robotic Grippers Offer Unprecedented Strength, Delicacy
NC State University News
Mick Kulikowski
August 2, 2023
A robotic gripper developed by researchers at North Carolina State University (NC State) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill can balance strength, gentleness, and precision to handle a wide range of objects. The researchers' gripper design builds on previous versions inspired by kirigami, the art of cutting and folding two-dimensional sheets into three-dimensional shapes. The new design distributes force throughout the gripper's structure to realize high levels of strength and delicacy. NC State's Jie Yin said the grippers boast a payload-to-weight ratio of approximately 16,000, enabling them to lift up to 6.4 kilograms while weighing just 0.4 grams. The researchers integrated the device with a myoelectric prosthetic hand to enable muscle-driven control for turning book pages and plucking grapes off a vine.
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Eight Months Pregnant Woman Arrested After False Facial Recognition Match
The New York Times
Kashmir Hill
August 6, 2023
Detroit police recently arrested eight-months-pregnant African American Porcha Woodruff for robbery and carjacking due to an erroneous offender match by facial recognition technology. Woodruff is the sixth person to report being wrongly accused of a crime through such a mismatch and the third such wrongful arrest involving the Detroit Police Department. City documents indicated the department uses a facial recognition vendor called DataWorks Plus to run unknown faces against a database of mug shots, returning matches ranked according to the probability of being the same person. Crime analysts decide if any matches are potential suspects, and the police report said a match for Woodruff's 2015 mug shot—which she said was from an arrest for driving with an expired license—prompted the analyst to give her name to the investigator.
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DNA Study Connects Living People to African Americans at Early Ironworks
Harvard Medical School News & Research
Stephanie Dutchen
August 3, 2023
Researchers at Harvard University, the Smithsonian Institution, and genetic testing company 23andMe analyzed the DNA of enslaved and free African Americans buried at an early U.S. ironworks to locate their descendants, finding 47,799 living genetic relatives. The researchers used a new algorithm to analyze DNA segments common to two or more individuals inherited from a recent shared ancestor. They found genetic links between living Americans and one or more of 27 gene-sequenced individuals from Maryland's Catoctin Furnace; 2,975 participants who shared more than 0.4% of Catoctin individuals' genomes were designated close relatives. Harvard’s David Reich said the study utilized both “ancient DNA technology, which makes it possible to efficiently sequence whole-genome data from human remains, and direct-to-consumer genetic databases that contain data from millions of people who have consented to participate in research.”
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AI Search of Neanderthal Proteins Resurrects 'Extinct' Antibiotics
Nature
Saima Sidik
July 28, 2023
Bioengineers at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) retrieved "extinct" antibiotic molecules with artificial intelligence (AI) by applying computational methods to data about proteins from modern humans and their Neanderthal and Denisovan forebears. The researchers trained an algorithm to identify human protein sites where peptide segmentation is established, then searched for new peptides by applying the algorithm to publicly available protein sequences of modern humans and their ancestors. The researchers assessed dozens of peptides, administering six—four from modern humans, one from Neanderthals, and one from Denisovans—to mice infected with Acinetobacter baumannii; their effectiveness in halting or killing the bacterium varied. Penn's Cesar de la Fuente suggested modifying the most successful molecules could boost efficacy, while tweaking the AI could reduce false positives.
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Strengthening Defenses Against Common Cyberattack
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Tom Rickey
August 3, 2023
Computer scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) developed a technique that outperforms traditional methods for detecting denial-of-service (DOS) attacks. During a DOS attack, there is a state of low entropy at the target address but high entropy among the sources of the clicks going to the target. The technique involves monitoring static entropy levels and trends over time. Tthe researchers used the Tsallis entropy formula for some of the underlying mathematics, which is hundreds of times more sensitive in distinguishing between legitimate flash events and DOS attacks than the Shannon entropy formula used by most DOS detection algorithms. PNNL's technique correctly identified 99% of DOS attacks, while 10 standard algorithms identified an average of 52% of such attacks.
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Researchers Map European Health, Digital Health Literacy
News-Medical.net
July 31, 2023
An international team that included researchers from Australia's RMIT University has developed a user-friendly atlas that maps European health and digital health literacy. The Global Atlas of Literacies for Health (GALH) provides interactive data on health and digital health literacy levels from evidence-based studies. The researchers analyzed over 12,000 studies and best-practice examples, narrowing them down to 450 from the last five years. In conjunction with the geospatial mapping firm dMap, the data was consolidated and visualized in an interactive map featuring raw data download capability and a list of best practices and policy resources. RMIT's Gabriela Irrazabal said, "Data can be compared across Europe or filtered across countries and demographics, enabling informed decisions on policies affecting health."
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Startup Uses Robots to 3D-Print Wind Turbine Blades
Fast Company
Adele Peters
August 3, 2023
California-based startup Orbital Composites is using three-dimensional (3D) printing and robotics to manufacture massive wind turbine blades at the locations at which they will be used. The company's technology enables high-speed 3D printing of composite materials; the system 3D-prints the blades within previously printed molds on a wind farm site. Eliminating the need for transportation makes it easier to fabricate longer blades, while 3D printing also cuts costs by utilizing only the exact amount of material. Next year, Orbital Composites will collaborate with the U.S. Department of Energy to test a 3D-printing robot that can shuttle along a cable system as it manufactures wind turbine blades.
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Drone Mothership Releases Mini-Drone Swarm for Search and Rescue
New Scientist
Matthew Sparkes
August 4, 2023
The MorphoLander carrier developed by scientists at Russia's Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) could enhance search-and-rescue operations by deploying a swarm of miniature drones as it hovers over, lands on, and traverses rough ground. The four-legged hybrid drone can maintain a level position when landing and walking, and can perch on difficult landing spots like power lines. Skoltech's Dzmitry Tsetserukou said the mothership can only fly continuously for about 12 minutes due to weight limits, but it can land and dispatch two mini-drones that can stay airborne for about 30 minutes.
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EU Late to the Quantum Party
IEEE Spectrum
Tammy Xu
August 6, 2023
The European Policy Center (EPC) think tank said the European Union (EU)'s quantum computing strategy lags behind those of other countries. With a quantum system that can crack modern cryptography due within the next 20 years, the EPC's Andrea G. Rodríguez said EU policymakers have little time to organize and deploy technical and logistical programs to become quantum-ready. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology will issue post-quantum cryptography standards next year, while the EPC says only organizations that utilize cryptography in their own code would need to pinpoint where to swap out their old standards for new ones. Rodríguez said the arduousness of this task requires the EU to develop a post-quantum cryptography strategy immediately, noting the bloc's quantum key distribution efforts lack maturity.
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